Buried beneath never-ending lines of code all day, I find it easy to forget that I am dealing with a whole bunch of dead people. In a simple sense, the ancient Roman tombstones I'm studying obviously marked the end of an individual's life. They sought to commemorate someone in a more tangible and reliable way than the human memory. But as I record the data from these objects, I am occasionally struck by an immediate connection to a person who died nearly two thousand years ago on the other side of the Atlantic.
Take poor Julius Hagnus, for example, who buried his daughter Pallas a month shy of her fourteenth birthday.
Sacred to the Shades of the Dead.
To Julia Pallas
Who lived 13 years and 11 months.
Julius Hagnus, a father, made
this for his very sweet
and most dearly missed daughter.
It was common practice for the Romans to record the age at death, down to the month and even day in many cases. Scholars have often remarked on the formulaic nature of these monuments, since the deceased is often simply described as "well-deserving" or, as here, "very sweet". But perhaps we begin to glimpse the father's bereavement in the unusual adjective "most dearly missed"(desiderantissima). Strictly speaking Pallas was no longer a child—she would probably have been married within the next year. And since no mother is mentioned, we are left with the impression of a poor father left completely on his own.
Roman tombstones have provided historians with good evidence for family structures, burial practices and patterns of commemoration. But they are also vital sources for dead people in another sense, because they are our best evidence for people who were otherwise socially dead. These are individuals such as household slaves, who were alienated from society and have left to us very few other traces of their identities. Similarly, in Butler library I have come across many small–time workers who chose to record their lives as hairdressers, smiths or charioteers, with dignity if not pride. They lived a world apart from the great politicians, writers and generals of our history books.
Hylas, a charioteer for the Blue faction, lived 25 years and won 7 races in the two-horse chariot.
Image CC License, courtesy of PicSwiss.
I want to bring these unpublished documents to life by organizing tagged versions of these tombstones online. These dead people deserve a place in the social history of everyday Romans, which will only become easier to write as more and more Latin inscriptions are systematically resurrected and added to a comprehensive and searchable corpus.
Long live the zombie Romans!